Milk Pixel at the Arnolfini

After a week of stress and late nights, Milk Pixel was up and running in the Arnolfini during Saturday and Sunday's uncurated open event unCraftivism. We kept the project more or less under wraps until the day so reactions were very interesting. Here are some pictures:

Milk Pixel is essentially a giant, interactive, 8x8 Red Green Blue LED array with each led pixel placed inside a plastic milk bottle. The textured plastic of the bottles diffuses the lights from the leds nicely to give some interesting colour combination.

The patterns of colours are generated from webcam and microphone input as well as number of manual controls. This means that the system responds to motion and sound. During the weekend the array was feeding off live musicians, projected films, games of tambourelli (badminton with tambourines) and anyone who happened to walk by during quiet moments. The Audio Visual driver software was written entierly in Processing. In the above photo the green parts of the array reflect movments of the brass instrument and player.

Here is the system with myself (center), Paul O'Dowd (left) and Thomas Burton (right). Jason Welsby is another memeber of the team that isn't in the photo.

Oh, and here's a video of it watching a movie while listening to a band. There are still some glitches that need to be ironed out so the representation of the audio / visual input is quite abstract at the moment...

If you were at craftivism and have any pictures of Milk Pixel I'd love to see them, leave a comment below...